Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 930
🕑 Added 2025-07-15 22:14:54 +0000 UTCWe stopped for the night after traveling for another few hours. We didn’t run into any new candidates, thankfully, and I was able to condense the mile wide liquid rock swamp into a complete building for us to use as a base of operations. A Piece of Mind parallel to control Mumur, combined with my EXTREME familiarity with the stone in question meant the whole lodge was impossible to spot even when I was unconscious, so I was free to catch some rest with everyone else.
Before that though, I decided to cook dinner for the whole camp. I felt the need to connect with my people a bit more. Our force had expanded massively, and it was getting hard to keep track of everyone. Without a personal stake, I was worried my new faction members would lose motivation.
But cooking for a thousand people was…a lot. Like a staggering amount of food and effort. I needed something easy and quick but also heavy and filling.
I turned, in the end, to the tried and true method of using food to reach out to a friend. Which is to say, I decided to make something to cheer up our wilting vampiress, who had been withdrawn and nervous since the incident earlier.
“Hey Bethy,” I called her over to where I stood in front of a huge metal pot. “I need your help with this.”
She shrugged, standing up to walk over to me blankly. “I don’t really know how to cook. You’d do a better job than me.” She stared down at the pot, seeming to lose herself in the dark recesses of the cooking implement. But I was having none of that.
“Well, sure,” I said casually. “But I’m making fondue. That’s just melted cheese. I’m sure you have some…thoughts, on what kind of cheese I should use, right?”
Her eyes snapped up to me, narrowing in suspicion. “Cheese?” She said slowly. “I know a lot about cheese.”
“I know, that’s why I asked,” I chuckled. “Of course, if you don’t want to help, I could always make soup or something. You’re a big fan of soup, aren’t you Bethy? I think I have the stuff for…lentil garlic.”
She flinched back, hissing dramatically. Chelsea, who had approached when she saw me drag Bethy over here, cleared her throat. “Um, hi, yeah, fondue is fine, but what’s with the hissing? Is the vampire garlic thing real? I’ve never seen Bethy pass up food because it had garlic in it, at least not that I noticed.”
“What?” Bethy asked in confusion. “No, I just really hate lentils.” She pouted at me. “Hey. you’re distracting me. I’m trying to be sad here.”
Chelsea giggled at that. “Yeah, stop. Gabe has been all broody since the end of the fight. I think he needs a hug.” She glanced at me. “After you help Shane pick out some cheeses for this fondue. I’m actually starving, and I want something to eat bad. What do we have to dip in it?”
I backed away as Bethy started digging in her ring for various wheels of cheese and plopping them down on a table she’d pulled from nowhere, loudly announcing the various types of dairy product we had on offer. I kept an ear out, but I was willing to let Chelsea handle that while I went and sought out another friend in need.
Gabe was sitting in the back corner, looking unhappy. Drewnokk had lost to our crew, and Ellia dn the others had driven off their C-rankers pretty easily. Once the twins vanished, no one had bothered to stick around to try to fight for nothing, and they’d scattered.
Our Adamant friend had immediately come to find us and check on Bethy, and on seeing her in tears over what had happened had pretty much shut down. His eyes looked haunted and blank, like he was lost in a fog, and I sat down next to him with a sigh. “Well, that fucking sucked, huh? This succession war isn’t exactly a party. You regretting coming along?”
He snorted. “I don’t do regrets,” he said with a bitter chuckle. “At least, not for helping friends. I just…I feel like I’m falling behind. My drive to advance has been waning. Not that I don’t want to keep up, but an Adamant is supposed to forge ahead, and you’re all leaving me in the dust.” He shot a glance at Bethy and Chelsea where the two of them were working on cheese picking. “I guess I just…I’ve been so comfortable here. Just one of the crowd. It’s hard to stand out when there are so many amazing people around, but that’s not always bad. Fitting in was…nice.”
I raised an eyebrow at his soft expression. “I’m very specifically NOT going to ask which of them you’re looking at right now, because if it’s my sister I’d have to kick your ass, and if it’s NOT my sister I might STILL have to kick your ass.” I was more convinced it was both, actually, but that was a mess I wanted absolutely no part of, and would leave to Chelsea. They were all adults, and their love lives weren’t my business.
“You think you could take me?” He grinned, his eyes lighting up with the challenge. “Think I might still be a bit too much for you. Never mess with cavalry. You should get a horse, it would pair well with that spear thing you’ve been doing lately.”
I snorted. “I don’t trust any mode of transportation that can make it’s own decisions. You might be able to cheat with your magic star horse, but I’d probably end up with some sarcastic asshole horse that would dump me off its back all the time. Sucks Archie is still pretty small. Riding a phoenix into battle would be badass.”
“That WOULD be cool,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder if I could figure out a way to adapt my charger into something that flies. Not a bird, but like…maybe a pegasus?”
I grinned at him. “Man, Bethy is a bad influence on you, huh? Or a really good one. Why don’t you go ask her about it, since she’s the most likely person here to figure out how to swing something like that.” My vampire friend regularly altered a fundamental transformation she’d been born with on a casual whim, turning into things like cats and squirrels just because she felt like it. I might be a Path genius, but Bethy was a natural prodigy at altering Skills like that on the fly.
Gabe seemed to brighten slightly, standing up and clapping me on the shoulder. “Thanks, Shane. You’re a good guy.”
“It’s cool man, you just need to get out of your head.” I nodded to him, smiling as he headed off to talk to my sister and Bethy. Yawning, I stood up and stretched. I glanced around, noting that everyone was sort of grouping up. All except one person. Benny was off by himself at a table he’d brought in, working on…something. Celine, Jessie, Mel, Abel, and Daysia were over with Holly and Serah, talking about some plant thing or other, but my best friend was all by himself using a series of complicated tools to alter the axe he’d gotten from the siege.
I approached, interested to see what he was doing, and found myself entranced by the process. The axe lay on the table, a dark stained wooden thing with what looked suspiciously like manacles sticking out of the ends. They were open and ignored, with Benny only using the central area of the table. Surrounding the axe were a variety of beakers, test tubes, and flasks, all connected together and bubbling away atop multicolored flames.
One of the flasks I recognized as the kind Zeke used to hold souls, and that one was sitting inside of a circle of oddly numerical symbols. Above it floated…something. A vague shape that seemed halfway stuck between fog and solid, losing its form by the moment as Benny adjusted knobs, feeding materials from the different flasks into the connecting tubes. The liquids dripped down through the soul, and I saw it lose some of its cohesion even further as one of the droplets took on an odd shine.
Rather than hit the flask though, the droplets landed on a wide funnel that interrupted the distance between them, draining down into another tube that led over to the axe. At the end of it, a bright flame glowed, like a butane torch, and Benny was using one hand to slowly engrave things on the axe blades while the other adjusted the various knobs expertly, slightly changing the consistency and color of the flame as he carved.
I whistled. “Damn, is this your new inventing process? I knew your ability would change how it worked, but that’s kind of involved.”
“It is,” he admitted, not even bothering to look up. “But the use of souls makes it both more and less restrictive. It’s more…open ended, weirdly, but that also means I can impose my will and control it better. Downside is that souls have tendencies, and they have trouble synchronizing with items that aren’t attuned to them.”
That was interesting. I knew souls weren’t people. They didn’t have a consciousness or sentience, exactly. The souls that Benny, Zeke, and people like my dad used weren’t trapped human beings suffering for eternity, they were just fragments of vital force that had been imprinted with the characteristics of the people they used to be. The ability for a soul to retain true consciousness was exclusive to mirror soul bodies, which was the reason they could be reformed after shattering.
He was staring hard at the axe head through a pair of odd goggles, but eventually grimaced and turned off the flame. He started packing everything up, taking the goggles off with a sigh. “This is starting to make my head hurt. I’ll come back to it later.”
“I noticed you haven’t upgraded any of your gear recently,” I said sympathetically. “I’m guessing this new style of creating has higher requirements?”
He nodded. “It does. Takes ages to get anything done. But I should never need to replace any of this stuff. Soul based artifacts will grow alongside me, and they have a much higher potential limit.” He patted the axe fondly. “This beast is going to be the basis of a powerful new ability that will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
Putting the axe away in his ring, he packed up the table, then stood and stretched. “Speaking of creating stuff, weren’t you supposed to be cooking dinner?”
I didn’t see the need to dignify that with a response. Flipping him off, I rolled my eyes, turned and headed back over to Bethy and Chelsea, who were currently arguing over the groaning table full of a dizzying area of cheeses. “No, we can’t use ALL of them,” my sister said indignantly. “More isn’t always better.”
“It’s CHEESE,” Bethy said with a mutinous pout. “More IS always better. Gabe tell her!”
“None of you get a vote,” I said ruthlessly as I stopped next to the precariously stacked tower. “And this is WAY too much cheese. You can pick like…three kinds. This is fondue, not alchemy.”
Bethy literally stomped her foot in outrage, but I couldn’t help but smile. Goofing off with the others put that classic Bethy sparkle back in her eye. She glared at me murderously for a moment, then looked away with a snort. “Fine. Smoked Gouda is my favorite. And Colby Jack is good. And Pepper Jack.”
She pointed them each out, and there were indeed several wheels of each. I tossed them casually into the pot, then lit the fire, making sure to keep the heat low. As the smell of cheese wafted out into the building, everyone else started flocking to the cooking pot and I grinned happily. This had been a pretty good plan.
Comments
Malcolm Tent
Something something cooking skill purification flame cheesemancy.
michael stitcher
None of those cheeses are good in fondue and all of them separate into water/whey and chunks when melted together; plus the jack has flakes of peppers in it. And the smoked gouda would not pair well as the smoked flavor would overwhelm the colby. But what do I know, just live in switzerland...
